


Emergent Occasions

by linman



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen, coda fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-22
Updated: 2015-01-22
Packaged: 2018-03-08 15:34:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3214391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linman/pseuds/linman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which birds follow Peter home to roost, Lesley plays a game of Mornington Crescent, and Nightingale interprets an escutcheon. Coda to <em>Foxglove Summer</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Emergent Occasions

I don’t know what you do when you’re offered a year of grace, but the first thing I did when I got home from the burning wilds was buy a tiny air conditioner and two fans and install the whole thing in the coach house, and take advantage of the artificial chill to play a massive amount of video games. I did this during the time I would normally be sleeping, of course, because it’s not like your work schedule evaporates along with the news coverage of your case. What with my obligations to the Leaning Tower of Paperwork, the firing range, the dusty tomes, the DPS, and certain rivers, I was keeping pretty busy.

And if the pre-dawn hours found me pausing the next boss level to listen for screaming birds in the sound of the fans, I kept that to myself.

I thought it was better than sleeping—perchance to dream and all that—but it might have shortened my temper a little bit. More.

“Why the fuck are your eyes all bloodshot?” Beverley demanded after two weeks of my little post-case regime, and after dragging out the details bit by bit, set to work making me tired enough to sleep for _two_ years of grace.  “Better set the alarm,” I mumbled into her pillow that afternoon.

I might not have been entirely coherent.

All this probably would have run its course soon enough, and I would have got my head clear and started attending to the not-at-all-2D boss on my horizon with reasonably suave aplomb, if Lesley had done what I expected her to do, and gone deeply incommunicado.

Instead, while dismantling the Leaning Tower leaf by virtual leaf, I checked my personal email and found a message without a subject head, from a generic email account.

It was from Our Toby at the handle of milliyap.007, and it read very simply:

_For emergency use only._

_BTW, I hope that raid wasn’t your idea._

The subtext of that, I thought, had _better_ be _Because you’re smarter than that_ , and not _Because I trusted you_. I forwarded the email to Inspector Pollock by way of report, and Nightingale for good measure in case he was checking his inbox this week, and carried on with the Leaning Tower, which seemed to be growing instead of shrinking.

Whose emergency use was this email address supposed to be for? Mine? Or hers? I had a sudden vision of the Faceless Man using Lesley for bait, in which case—what? She emails me in advance to tell me not to be stupid? Or was the emergency supposed to be mine, in which case I go blathering my position to the ether for the championship in stupid points. Right.

Or, it wasn’t a strategic move at all, but a tactical one, the point being to keep me off balance in the present. Or to tease the DPS some more. Who the fuck knew.

I heard back from Pollock three hours later, while I was at dinner with Nightingale. The IP from which the email originated had been traced to a flat in Hampstead, whose owner had neglected to password-protect his wi-fi router. The building, of course, was in a CCTV blind spot; a slight woman in a hoodie had been spotted a few streets away before being lost in another blind patch, and nothing else had turned up. The internet poachee had been told off to secure his connection in future, and the ready feathers of the retrieval teams had smoothed back down.

“You’ll have to acknowledge receipt,” Pollock said. And then heaved a sigh before adding, “Better go with a light touch this time. Even tenuous contact is better than none.”

I wasn’t too sure about that. But the trouble with kicking things up above your pay grade is that you don’t even get the luxury of being wrong.  _Keep your head down_ , Lesley had said.  Well, how much more down did she want?

“I’m not sure this email isn’t exactly what it says on the tin,” I said. “I doubt replying will draw any more contact.”

“Well, it’s worth trying. But don’t get cute,” he cautioned me.

Look, not _all_ my casework involves hijacked ambulances. Okay—or cratered tube stations. Or pancaked high-rise residence towers, hold the fruit and Nutella.

“You have leave to mention the fact that the raid wasn’t your idea. Keep her goodwill. Maybe even make her think she might get an opportunity to peel you off.”

And incidentally give Pollock a chance to test my probity from yet another angle.  “Yes, sir,” I said, instead of what I wanted to say.

Nightingale read my expression as I hung up and set the phone on the table. “It _is_ the most logical course of action.”

He said it very gently. Nightingale’s been treating me with kid gloves recently. If it’s not Beverley accusing me of Spockitude, it’s Nightingale—and everybody else—expecting me to snap any moment and start running around in circles howling at the moon.

Tried that; didn’t work.

I said, “That’s me, Peter Grant—logical and complaisant. Keeping my head down. Happy to oblige.”

After dinner I sent my reply, with a bcc to Pollock and Nightingale.

_A near-total absence of initiative on my part seems to be the universal mandate_ , I said. (All parties would certainly understand the double-edged commentary of _that_ , but probably only Nightingale would be amused.) _So thanks for the bat-signal, but I’m not entirely sure what the point of it is_.

_And no, the raid wasn’t my idea, but it doesn’t matter. I’m a copper, and I care about you. They’re not mutually exclusive. I told you you should have come in_.

I fully expected this missive to be met with resounding and lasting silence, but again I was wrong. After another night giving myself epic finger blisters with the game-controller, I sat down to my computer late that morning to find this response:

_And I told you, there’s no turning back._

_Stop messing me about, Peter, and get back to work_.

And that was when I finally lost my temper. Like _I_ was the one playing a deadly game of Mornington fucking Crescent with the Met.

I found out later that this email had been sent from a dodgy internet café in Battersea (Battersea? for fuck’s sake) after which a freak power surge had fried every unit in the place and, not coincidentally, all the relevant cameras.

Even later, I found out that the owner of said dodgy internet café had been arrested and confessed to being a major player in a child pornography ring, after submitting a list of serial numbers for his buggered equipment to his insurance provider.

That’s Lesley’s style of policing, all right: minimal action, maximal impact. Simple and trenchant.

Which this, to bring this back to the present, was not.

Without waiting for the green light from on high, I hit reply and bcc’d Pollock and Nightingale as before.

_So that’s going on your family crest now, is it? Taser sable on a field azure (_ sed quis custodiet ipsos fucking custodes? _), motto:_ Alea iacta est _?_

_I didn’t start this. Cut me a fucking break_.

This resulted in my having to adjust my afternoon schedule for a severe in-person bollocking, but it wasn’t till the next day that the aftertaste of guilt really set in. A lasting aftertaste, as it turned out, because the radio silence I had expected all along moved in and swallowed up the ether like an old-fashioned particular.

Yet two weeks later a small brown-paper-wrapped parcel addressed to me arrived at the Folly. A number of personnel in total disproportion to the parcel’s size having determined that it contained no bombs, demon traps, caltrops, devices, bioweapons, tags, or vestigia of any kind, I was allowed to unwrap it. (Molly silently filched the brown paper away, for inscrutable purposes of her own.)

It was a battered reprint of a book about amateur forensic heraldry (“Ah yes, Giles Dinsley-Bandercroft,” Nightingale said knowledgeably) and on the flyleaf was pencilled a line of text in a handwriting I knew.

_Sable, a carpenter’s square sanguine on a chief wavy azure, pelican naiant argent, motto:_ Consilium callidum ineo.

It was Lesley all over: this-is-the-way-you- _ought_ -to-do-it, in-your-face competence. She had also thoughtfully provided a pencil sketch of the escutcheon for my convenience, with a quite passable pelican and the carpenter’s square like a cocked eyebrow.

“Interesting,” said Nightingale, frowning over my shoulder in the foyer where we stood. “I’m uncertain of the significance of the motto. Do you know to whose crafty plan she is referring?”

“ _Cunning_ plan,” I said. “So cunning it out-cunnings the cunningest plan ever crafted by the finest smiths of cunningness this side of Cunnington Manor. No, sir, it doesn’t have any cryptic significance. She’s just mocking me.”

“Mm. But she gave you a pelican.”

“A funny-looking brown-and-white waterbird, scaring the tourists in St. James’s Park?”

He indicated the book with a gesture. “I’m sure it’s all in there. There are a lot of available, even applicable, symbols, but she chose this one. In legend,” Nightingale said, “the pelican would tear at its own breast to feed its young with its blood, if no food was available. It became a symbol of a charitable nature and self-sacrifice.”

I looked away. “That isn’t a quality Lesley admires,” I said.

“Or,” Nightingale answered in his gentle voice, “it’s a quality she thinks is out of her reach.”

Then he went away.

Nightingale was right—she could have chosen just about anything. A bomb, like; or a tower, or a falcon (ha); she could have even put Toby on there.

But Lesley is never satisfied with the low-hanging fruit, so she picked a pelican. _Out of her reach_ …it occurred to me that by her testimony, and in the best light (criminally misguided), Lesley had attempted something like this: sacrificing her reputation—which was her lifeblood—and her safety, and my trust, and god knew what else, not just for her benefit but mine as well. I looked up the square, which predictably meant rectitude; a sanguine square—victory through patience in battle. And again I say ha.

It wasn’t like Lesley to wildly overestimate my character, or to express anything like a…sanguine trust in my ability to clear a case. So what was she doing burnishing my shield to a mirror polish—

My breath stopped. A mirror.

A mirror, I thought, that wouldn’t reflect her back as a monster. Or lie to her, either.

_In case of emergency, break looking-glass._

_Damn it, Lesley_.

I blinked my eyes clear and closed the book.

That night, I retired to my own room in the house, wound up the analog alarm clock on the bedside table, and lay down.

And fell asleep in the silence almost at once.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the usual suspects, [hedda62](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hedda62/pseuds/hedda62) and [kivrin](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kivrin/pseuds/Kivrin) for beta, plus [Philomytha](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Philomytha/pseuds/Philomytha) for the English>Latin translation and the Brit-picking. Baldrick would thank you.
> 
> I definitely put the "amateur" in "amateur forensic heraldry," so all heraldic lore here is to be taken with a grain of salt. I did not mention that the color sable (besides being black) symbolizes both constancy and grief, azure means truth and loyalty (subliminally suggested to Peter by the blues of his profession, hence his using it with savage irony), and argent means peace and sincerity.
> 
> Peter's quotation of Latin is limited to common proverbs here -- "but who's guarding the guards?" and "the die is cast" respectively.


End file.
